First Indian on NASDAQ: Kanwal Rekhi

Episode notes

When every networking engineer in Silicon Valley said TCP/IP was wrong for Ethernet, one IIT graduate from India ignored the consensus, built the internet's physical backbone, and still got passed over for CEO twice because of his ethnicity. Kanwal Rekhi, co-founder of TiE and the first Indian founder to list a venture-backed company on NASDAQ, joins host Akshay Datt to unpack the contrarian bets, the ruthless founder-evaluation framework, and his central provocation for the Indian startup ecosystem: India does not need more unicorns, it needs 10 million entrepreneurs. Born in what is now Pakistan in 1945, Kanwal Rekhi arrived in the US in 1967 as part of India's first IIT emigrant wave, survived three layoffs, and co-founded Excelan, the first company to commercialise Ethernet and TCP/IP, taking it public on NASDAQ in 1987 with $22M in revenue and 70-90% gross margins. He later served as EVP and CTO at Novell when it reached $12 billion in market cap as the world's second-largest software company, before co-founding TiE, today the world's largest entrepreneur network.

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